CODEOWNERS compatibility

CODEOWNERS, reviewer suggestions, and required approvals

These are three different mechanisms, and this package deliberately occupies only one of them:

• CODEOWNERS declares who owns paths. Your platform can use it to auto-request owners and, with branch protection, to require their approval.
• Reviewer suggestion (this package) ranks candidates using ownership as one signal among five — alongside commit history, recency, access, and current review load — and explains every choice with evidence. It reads CODEOWNERS; it never edits it.
• Required approvals are enforced by branch protection and approval rules on your platform. This package parses GitLab section approval counts as metadata boundaries only and does not enforce branch protection or required approvals.

They compose: keep CODEOWNERS and required approvals as your enforcement layer, and use suggestions to pick the best eligible reviewer rather than any owner — especially where a path has many owners, an overloaded expert, or no owner at all.

File locations

The file is read at the captured target/base revision, matching what the platform itself would apply to the change.

Supported semantics

Supported on both platforms: anchored paths, basename rules, directory rules, *, **, ?, last-match precedence, and ownerless clearing. GitLab additionally supports character classes, sections, optional sections, section defaults, direct role owners (@@developer, @@maintainer, @@owner), and section-local exclusions.

Platform differences are honored rather than averaged: GitLab treats owner mentions after an inline # as owners, while GitHub ignores inline comments; GitHub-invalid negations and character-class patterns are skipped. Paths remain case-sensitive.

Owner resolution

Team and group ownership resolves to eligible individual users — active, non-bot members with write access or higher. GitLab group resolution honors shared-group access and group ancestry. Inaccessible resolution (for example, a token without team visibility) is reported as an optional signal warning, not a failure. Email owner entries need a resolvable email identity; see authentication and permissions.